Food and Crafts for All Occasions

The King of Pancakes: Dutch Baby

Dutch baby is an amazingly versatile, super delicious and astonishingly easy to make oven-baked hybrid of pancake and popover. It can be made sweet or savory and topped before or after baking with all sorts of tasty things. It’s good for breakfast, br/lunch or dinner and is suitable for both everyday meal or special occasions.

Super Topping: Baked Nectarines and Blueberries

To continue on nectarines and blueberries, here’s the simplest recipe you can cook with them and it makes an awesome topping for ice creams, semifreddo or yogurt parfait. I myself can eat them plain, especially when they are still slightly warm. So make sure to cook plenty - I guarantee you will find yourself sneaking them in your mouth right from the baking dish again and again, so delish they are!

Baked Eggs, aka Shirred Eggs, aka Oeuf en Cocotte

When it comes to breakfast, Ilya's and mine first choice is always eggs. Simply boiled – hard-boiled to eat with mayo or soft-boiled to spoon out. Sunny side up or over easy on a bed of slowly sautéed onions. Scrambled with hot peppers and ham. Poached in spicy tomato sauce, Shakshuka style.

Today I'd like to share with you another favorite recipe of ours - baked eggs (sometimes also referred to as shirred eggs). In France, this dish is known as oeuf en cocotte. Everything sounds so much cuter in French, doesn't it?

Blini, Russian Crepes

Blini are Russian crepes. They can be made with yeast or plain batter, with regular wheat flour or its combination with other flours, like buckwheat, rye etc. My all-time favorite is small, very thin blini made from a simple non-yeast batter based on all purpose flour and milk.  

These blini go equally well with savory and sweet toppings. Most of all I love them topped with salmon caviar. Paired with a shot of ice cold vodka or hot, sweetened black tea – mmmmm…. Ilya loves them with homemade lox with onions and fresh dill. For dessert, my choice would be to top them with a dollop of sour cream and sprinkle with white cane sugar just like I used to do it when I was a kid.

Dungeness Crab Season: Crab, Onions and Rau Ram Omelet

Every time I go to the store these days and see that whole cooked Dungeness crab hasn’t disappeared from the fish and seafood display, I’m about to hop on one leg and joyfully shout “It’s still here! It’s still here!”

I thought that after more than a month of crab cakes, crab dips, crab salads, crab ravioli, crab melts and just simple whole crab with butter on the side I would be literally fed up with this little sea creature.  Nope, didn’t happen! As with any addiction, the more you get, the more you want.

So instead of only having crab for dinner, I now also start my day with it (can half an hour on elliptical count as extenuating circumstance in my case?). For breakfast, I often love to treat my lovely self with an omelet. Not an aristocratic French-style un omelette -  pale, thin, and elegantly rolled into a tube, but a robust looking, golden-brown, thick omelet with fluffy, delicate and light exterior. Just the way I like it!

Our Ideal Saturday

For food crazies like us, ideal Saturday means lots of good cooking and good eating. This is how our last Saturday went.

Starting breakfast: Fruit salad with non-fat organic vanilla yogurt and crunchy granola with oats, puffed rice and pumpkin seeds.

After a pretty quick farmer's market shopping for morels (hurray! they are 25$ per pound now) and garlic spears, we returned home and started to smoke the spicy Andouille sausages we stuffed the day before.

While they were smoking,we had sandwiches with home-smoked salmon, Persian cucumbers, sour cream and horseradish, all on a Russian rye bread:

And after I made two batches of strawberry jam, one with lavender and another one with chocolate.

The sausages are ready:

And so are the jams:

Despite snacking on the jams and sausages (you have to taste what you cook, right?), we still had some room  left for light dinner:

And some after dinner cooking, just cannot stop yet. Morels were halved, soaked, washed, sauteed and put into the fridge.

If we're going to have more morels this year, I'll freeze them (sauteed) so we can enjoy them in winter too.

How to Poach an Egg

Happy Easter Yesterday!

I was planning to post this recipe yesterday but our favorite neighbors invited us to join them for the Easter brunch (all day event, as a rule, especially with the weather like that), so my posting plans fell through.

Now here I am with the recipe/theory of how to cook a perfect poached egg.

Chawan Mushi, My Favorite Breakfast

Eggs are my favorite breakfast meal. I like them in all styles - fried sunny-side up or over easy, soft boiled, poached, baked en cocotte, scrambled.  Chawan mushi, a steamed Japanese egg custard, is one of my recent favorites. Extremely light and airy, with silky mouth feel and delicious, delicate flavor  - what's not to like?

Traditionally, it is served as an appetizer, hot or cold, but I prefer to have it for breakfast or lunch.